I don't know how many times I'm going to have to go over this time and time and time again. It's almost like you people have a learning disability.

That was before this:

The Southern Strategy was designed to capitalize on Southern white resentment of court-enforced busing to end school desegregation, of the 1964 Civil Rights Act's prohibition of discrimination in interstate commerce, of enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act to prevent historically racist Southern counties and states from discriminating against blacks who sought to exercise their right to vote where once they'd been effectively barred. By playing on these issues, Nixon and other Republicans of this era won many traditionally Democratic votes in the South. Later, GOP opposition to affirmative action, race-based hiring "quotas" and all other methods of compensating for the debilitating legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation fed into what was one of the momentous shifts, a total turnaround in just more than a decade (1970 to 1984) from a solidly Democratic South to a solidly Republican one.

A new book about Strom Thurmond, the openly racist senator from South Carolina (he ran as a "Dixiecrat" against Truman in 1948) details how Thurmond's switch from the Democratic Party to the GOP in 1964 was the harbinger and instigator for that shift to a solidly Republican South. Eventually the party became somewhat less overt in its public statements but not in its appeal at the voting booth.

Which means in practice that the GOP starts out every presidential election with some 100 electoral votes, more than a third of the way to the 270 electoral votes needed for victory.

Is it an accident that these 100 votes come from the core states of the Old Confederacy—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina?